Legends Read online

  Martin felt claustrophobic in the airless closet; he had a visceral revulsion for closed spaces without windows. “Something doesn’t make sense here,” he said, eyeing the door, mastering an urge to throw it open. “How could Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov send a letter to you if you were in the FBI’s witness protection—”

  Martin’s mouth sagged open; the answer to his question came to him before Kastner supplied it.

  “It was because he was able to send a letter to me,” Kastner said, “despite my being in the FBI program, that it was out of the realm of possibility to refuse him. Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov is one of the richest men in all of Russia; one of the fifty richest men in the world, according to that article in Time. He has a long arm, long enough to reach someone who has been given a new identity and lives on President Street in Crown Heights.” He glanced at Stella and the two exchanged grim smiles. “Long enough,” Kastner continued, “to reach his two beautiful girls, also. When the Oligarkh asks for a favor, it is not healthy to refuse if you are confined to a wheel chair and have nowhere else to defect to.”

  Martin remembered the words from the Bob Dylan song he’d heard in the street and he repeated them aloud: “Not much is really sacred.”

  “Not true,” Kastner burst out. “Many things are still sacred. Protecting my daughters is at the top of the list.”

  “Kastner could not be expected to anticipate how Samat would mistreat Elena,” Stella put in. “It was not his fault—”

  Kastner cut her off. “Whose fault was it if not mine?” he said despondently.

  “Aren’t you running a risk by hiring me to find this Samat?”

  “I only want him to give my Elena the religious divorce so she can marry again. What he does with his life after that is his affair. Surely this is not an unreasonable request.” Kastner worked the joystick, backing the wheelchair into the wall with a light thud. He shrugged his heavy shoulders as if he were trying to rid himself of a weight. “In terms of money, how do we organize this?”

  “I pay my way with credit cards. When the credit card people ask me for money, I will ask you to pay my expenses. If I find Samat and your daughter gets her get, we’ll figure out what that’s worth to you. If I don’t find him, you’ll be out of pocket my expenses. Nothing more.”

  “In your pool parlor you spoke of the problem of searching for a needle in a field of haystacks,” Stella said. “Where on earth do you begin looking for it?”

  “Everyone is somewhere,” Martin informed her. “We’ll start in Israel.”

  Stella, startled, said, “We?”

  Martin nodded. “First off, there’s your sister—she’ll trust me more if you’re with me when I meet her. Then there’s Samat. Someone on the run can easily change his appearances—the color and length of his hair, for instance. He could even pass himself off as an Arab and cover his head with a kaffiyeh. I need to have someone with me who could pick him out of a crowd if she only saw his seaweed-green eyes.”

  “That more or less narrows it down to me,” Stella agreed.

  1997: MINH SLEEPWALKS THROUGH ONE-NIGHT STANDS

  DRESSED IN LOOSE-FITTING SILK PANTS AND A HIGH-NECKED SILK blouse with a dragon embroidered on the back, Minh was clearing away the last of the dirty lunch dishes when Tsou Xing poked his head through the kitchen doors and asked her if she would run upstairs and check Martin’s beehives. He would do it himself, he said, but he was expecting a delivery of Formosan beer and wanted to count the cartons before they stored them in the cellar to make sure he wasn’t being short changed. Sure, Minh said. No problem. She opened the cash register and retrieved Martin’s keys and headed for the street, glad to have a few minutes to herself. She wondered if Tsou suspected that she had slept with Martin. She thought she’d spotted something resembling a leer in his old eyes when Tsou raised the subject of their upstairs’ neighbor earlier that week; he had been speaking in English but had referred to Martin using the Chinese word for hermit. Where you think yin shi goes when he goes? Tsou had asked. Minh had hunched her muscular shoulders into a shrug. It’s not part of my job to keep track of the customers, she’d replied testily. No reason climb on high horse, Tsou had said, whisking a fly from the bar with the back of his only hand. Not a crime to think you could know, okay? And he had smiled so wickedly that the several gold teeth in his mouth flashed into view. Well, I don’t know and I couldn’t care less, Minh had insisted. Pivoting on a heel, she had stalked off so Tsou would get the message: She didn’t appreciate his sticking his nose into her love life, or lack of same.

  Now Minh rubbed her sleeve across the private-eye logo on Martin’s front door to clean the rain stains off of it, then let herself in and, taking the steps two at a time, climbed to the pool parlor. Actually, she did wonder where Martin had gone off to; wondered, too, why he hadn’t left a message for her as well as Tsou. She attributed it to Martin’s shyness; he would have been mortified if he thought Tsou had gotten wind of their relationship, assuming you could call their very occasional evenings together a relationship. She meandered through the pool parlor, brushing her fingers over his Civil War guns and the folders on his desk and the unopened cartons that contained heaven knows what. Soon after he’d moved in she had asked him if he wanted help opening them. He’d kicked at one of the cartons and had said he didn’t need to open them, he knew what was inside. The reply struck her as being very in character.

  When Minh thought about it, which was more often than she liked to admit, the fact that she really wasn’t sure where she stood with yin shi exasperated her. He always seemed happy enough to see her but he never went out of his way to initiate meetings. Minh had been raised in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, a cauldron simmering with refugees of one sort or another, so she knew one when she saw one; the thing that betrayed them was they seemed to be alone even in a crowd. She herself was in the country illegally, a refugee from Taiwan. Minh was not even her real name, a detail she’d never revealed to Martin for fear he might be shocked. Sometimes she had the weird feeling that Martin, too, was some kind of refugee—though from what, she had no clue. Yin shi lived what she thought of as a boring life, ordering up the same dishes three or four nights a week, attending to his hives on the roof, making love to her when she turned up at his door. For excitement, he broke into hotel rooms to photograph husbands committing adultery, though when he described what he did for a living he managed to make even that sound boring. The single time she had raised the subject of boredom he had astonished her by admitting that he relished it; boring himself to death, he’d insisted, was how he planned to spend the rest of his life.

  At the time Minh had thought it was one of those things you say to sound clever. Only later did it dawn on her that he’d meant every word; that boring yourself to death was a way of committing suicide in slow motion.

  Stepping into the back room, Minh straightened the sheets and blanket on the cot, emptied the water from the plastic basin on the floor, closed the refrigerator door, put away the dishes that Martin had finally gotten around to washing. She retrieved Martin’s faded white jumpsuit and, rolling up the cuffs and the sleeves, slipped into it and zipped up the front. She put on the pith helmet with the mosquito netting hanging from it and took a look at herself in the cracked mirror over the bathroom sink. The outfit was not what you would call feng shui. Taking Martin’s smoke gun from under the sink, she made her way up the stairs to the roof. The sun, high overhead, was burning off the last drops of rain that had fallen the previous night. Vapor rose from shallow puddles as she crossed the roof to the hives. Martin had bought them and the equipment, and even the first queen bees, from a catalogue when he got it into his head to raise bees. In the beginning he had pored over the instruction book that came with the hives. Then he’d dragged a chair up to the roof and had spent hours staring at the colonies, trying to figure out if there was a flight pattern to the swarm’s movements, a method to its apparent madness. Minh had never seen him do anything with such intensity. When he’d begun insp
ecting and cleaning the frames he’d worn gloves, but he discarded them when Minh happened to mention the Chinese belief that bee stings stimulated your hormones and increased your sex drive. Not that the subsequent stings on his hands had changed anything—it was invariably Minh who made the first move toward the cot in the back of the loft, pulling Martin into the room, onto the cot, peeling off her clothing and then his. He made love to her cautiously, as if (she finally realized) he, not she, were fragile; as if he were afraid to let emotions surface that he might not be able control.

  Minh was crouching in front of the first hive, preparing the smoker, ruminating on how making love with Martin had been like sleepwalking through a string of one-night stands that were physically satisfying but emotionally frustrating, when the dumdum bullet plunged into the frames. There was an instant of absolute silence, as if the 20,000 residents of the hive—those that had survived the impact—had been reduced to a state of catatonic bewilderment. Then a raging yellowish-brown football-sized swarm burst out of the hive with such ferocity it knocked Minh over backward. The pith helmet and veil flew off to one side and the bees attacked her nostrils and her eyes, planting their darts with savage vengeance. She clenched her fingers into fists and hammered wildly at the layers of bees encrusting her skin, crushing them by the hundreds until her knuckles were covered with a sticky residue. There was no longer a sun overhead, only a thick carpet of rioting insects ricocheting off one another as they fought for a turn at the intruder who had wrecked their hive.

  Her face and lids swelling, Minh slumped back onto the hot tarpaper of the roof, swatting weakly at the bees the way Tsou had whisked at the fly on the bar. As the pain gave way to numbness, she heard a voice that sounded remarkably like her own telling Martin that, hey, you really shouldn’t wear gloves. Sure there’s a reason why. According to the Chinese, bee stings can stimulate your …

  1997: OSKAR ALEXANDROVICH KASTNER DISCOVERS THE WEIGHT OF A CIGARETTE

  THE TWO MEN IN CON-ED UNIFORMS PARKED THEIR REPAIR TRUCK in the narrow alley between President and Carroll and made their way on foot to the only back garden on the block protected by a chainlink fence. One of the men muttered something into a walkie-talkie, listened for a response and nodded to his colleague when he heard it. The second man produced a key, opened the door in the fence and used the same key to switch off the alarm box inside. The two, walking soundlessly on crepe soled shoes, climbed the stairs to the porch. Using a second key, they let themselves into the kitchen at the rear of the house and punched the code into the alarm there. They stood motionless for several minutes, their eyes fixed on the ceiling. When they heard the muffled scrape of a wheelchair rolling along a hallway over their heads, the two men produced pistols fitted with silencers and started up the back staircase. Reaching the first floor, they could hear a radio playing in the front room. Gripping their pistols with both hands, angling the barrels up, they worked their way along the hall to the closed door and flattened themselves against the wall on either side of it. One of the men tapped the side of his nose to indicate he had gotten a whiff of foul smelling cigarette smoke; their quarry was inside the room. Baring his teeth in a tight smile, his companion grasped the knob and flung open the door and the two of them, hunched over to keep their profiles low, burst into the room.

  Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner, sitting in his wheelchair next to the window, was oiling the firing mechanism on a Soviet PPSh 41, a Second World War automatic weapon in mint condition. Smoke coiled up from a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Kastner’s heavy lidded eyes blinked slowly as he took in the intruders. One appeared much older than the other but the younger man, gesturing to the other to shut the door, seemed to be in charge.

  “Vy Russky?” Kastner inquired.

  “Da. Ya Russky,” replied the younger Con-Ed man. “I gdye vasha doch?”

  Kastner eyed the pearl-handled Tula-Tokarev on the table, a 1930s pistol that he always kept charged, but he knew he could never reach it. “Ya ne znayu,” he replied. He was not about to tell them that Stella was on her way to Israel, accompanied by a CIA agent turned detective who lived over a Chinese restaurant. He wondered how the two killers had broken through the chainlink fence and gotten into the kitchen without tripping the alarms. “You took your time getting here,” Kastner growled in English. “Nine years.” He set the PPSh down and, working the joystick, maneuvered the wheelchair so that his back was to the intruders.

  “Kto vas poslal?” he asked.

  “Oligarkh,” the younger gunman said with a ruthless snicker.

  Gazing out the window, Kastner caught sight of two small Lubavitch boys, dressed in black like their fathers, hurrying down the street. He knew from Elena that they expected the Messiah to appear at any moment and redeem mankind. Maybe this Messiah had turned up and the boys were actually angels on their way to welcome him. He himself would surely end up where angels fear to tread, as that song Stella played on the Victrola put it. Kastner gasped when he felt the needle prick the skin of his back next to the shoulder blade. In his day the KGB specialists in wetwork had favored a tasteless, colorless rat poison that thinned the blood and brought breathing to an abrupt halt. The Oligarkh’s hit men would surely be using something more sophisticated and less traceable; perhaps one of those newfangled adrenalin-like substances that caused widespread gastric bleeding and, eventually, death, or, better still, a clotting agent that blocked a coronary artery and triggered what doctors called a myocardial infarction and laymen referred to as a heart attack. On the off-chance that one of the angels might ask him to identify himself, Kastner tried to recollect what his name had been before the FBI assigned the pseudonym Oskar. It irritated him that he was unable to remember what his mother had called him as a child. If he could suck on his cigarette, it would surely calm his nerves long enough for the name to come back to him. Moving languidly, as if he were underwater, Kastner reached for the ashtray. With great concentration he managed to pinch the cigarette between his thumb and two fingers, only to discover that it was too heavy to lift.

  1987: DANTE PIPPEN BECOMES AN IRA BOMBER

  ASSEMBLED IN A WINDOWLESS STORAGE ROOM IN A BASEMENT OF Langley filled with empty watercoolers, the eight people around the conference table started, as always, with the family name and in short order narrowed the list down to one that had an Irish ring to it, but then spent the next half hour debating how it should be spelled. In the end the chairman, a station chief who reported directly to Crystal Quest, the new Deputy Director of Operations, turned to the agent known as Martin Odum, who had been following the discussion from a chair tilted back against the wall; as Martin’s “Odum” legend had been burned and he would be the person employing the new identity, it would save time if he settled on the spelling. Without a moment’s hesitation, Martin opted for Pippen with three p’s. “I’ve been reading newspaper stories about a young black basketball player at the University of Central Arkansas named Scottie Pippen,” Martin explained. “So I thought Pippen would have the advantage of being easy to remember.”

  “Pippen it is,” announced the chairman and he turned to the selection of a Christian name to go with Pippen. The junior member of the Legend Committee, a Yale-educated aversion therapist, sarcastically suggested that they might want to go whole hog and use Scottie as the Christian name. Maggie Poole, who had read medieval French history as an Oxford undergraduate and liked to salt her conversation with French words, shook her head. “You’re all going to think I am off the wall but I came up with a name in my dreams last night that I consider parfait. Dante, as in Dante Alighieri?” She looked around the table expectantly.

  The only other woman on the committee, a lexicographer on loan from the University of Chicago, groaned. “Problem with Dante Pippen,” she said, “is it wouldn’t go unnoticed. People tend to remember a name like that.”

  “But don’t you see, that’s exactly what makes it an excellent choice,” exclaimed Maggie Poole. “Nobody thumbing down a list of names would suspect Dante Pip
pen of being a pseudonyme precisely because it stands out in a crowd.”

  “She has a point,” agreed the committee’s doyen, a gargoyle-like CIA veteran who had started out creating legends for OSS agents during World War Two.

  “I will admit I don’t dislike the sound of Dante,” ventured the aversion therapist.

  The chairman looked at Martin. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Martin repeated the names several times. Dante. Dante Pippen. “Uh-huh. I think it suits me. I can live with Dante Pippen.”

  Once the committee had decided on a name, the rest of the cover story fell neatly into place.

  “Our Dante Pippen is obviously Irish, born, say, in County Cork.”

  “Where in County Cork?”

  “I once vacationed in a seaport called Castletownbere,” said the aversion therapist.

  “Castletownbere, Cork, has a good ring to it. We’ll send him there for a week of R and R. He can get a local map and the phone book, and fix in his head the names of the streets and hotels and stores.”

  “Castletownbere is a fishing port. He would have worked on a salmon trawler as a teenager.”

  “Then when the economy turned bad, he would have gone off to try his luck in the New World, where he will have picked up a lot about the history of the Irish in America—the potato famine of 1840 that brought the first Irish immigrants to our shores, the Civil War draft riots, that sort of thing.”